Horsepower bonanza at Dubai show

The Dubai Motor Show has always been about the supercars and horsepower.

PHOTO: Karim Sahib, AFP/Getty Images

Event a testament to glorious excess

By David Booth, National Post

Originally published: December 21, 2009

SMALL

MEDIUM

LARGE

DUBAI – Well, at least they tried. Like so many auto shows of late, the Dubai International Motor Show tried to go green this year, making “sustainable mobility” the theme for its 10th annual exposition. General Motors and Ford sent over some heavy hitters to pontificate at what the show was calling the Middle East’s first sustainable mobility forum. There was even a kid’s scavenger hunt competition with grade schoolers scurrying around the place looking for anything even remotely green.

I could have used a little help myself. Oh, I eventually found Chevrolet’s Volt, but it was parked behind so many Hummers and Avalanches as to be invisible. In fact, it isn’t even being imported to the not-as-United-as-they-used-to-be Emirates. Likewise, Toyota had its ultra-tiny IQ on display, but no immediate plans for importation. There was talk of the company importing hybrids, but it’s only a rumour for now. Oh, and there was an electric vehicle, the Taiwanese Luxgen, but it was buried deep at the show’s bottom end. Even the few hybrids prominently displayed — notably BMW’s ActiveHybrid X6 and the Mercedes S400 — are geared toward luxury and performance.

Of course, green is always going to be a difficult colour to sell when gasoline is about six cents a litre and the country’s GDP per citizen works out to some phantasmagorical number that would make even the Swiss blanch. Indeed, the most pertinent question raised by the sustainability forum was not how to go green but whether “consumers in the Middle East will ever convert to more sustainable vehicles.”

Judging from the show, the answer would be an emphatic No. For instance, the Kepler Motion unveiled in Dubai is nominally a hybrid, but the specification sheet for the car boasts 800 horsepower and a zero-to-96-kilo-metres-an-hour time of less than 2.5 seconds with nary a mention of fuel economy. According to program manager Neil Hannemann of McLaren fame (which explains why the Motion looks startlingly like the much-missed F1), a twin-turbocharged 3.5-litre version of Ford’s EcoBoost V6 powers the rear wheels while a 250-hp electric motor drives the front. A common theme running throughout the show was limited, almost coachbuilt, build numbers — with the Kepler ceasing production after only 50 are built.

Not far away and abandoning any pretense of sustainability, Danish boutique auto-maker Zenovo claims 1,104 hp from a bespoke 7.0-litre V8 that sports both a supercharger and a turbocharger. According to Troels Vollertsen, the company’s tech guru, the problem with its ST1 isn’t so much getting enough horsepower — he claims the engine had to be detuned from about 1,450 hp– but putting the power to the ground. Indeed, the ST1 has switchable governors that limit the engine to 650 hp and 850 hp.

Vollertsen also notes, without a single scintilla of irony, that the 650-hp mode is for wet roads when one just wants “normal driving.” Zenovo will build even fewer ST1s, stopping production after just 15 of the $1-million super-duper cars are built.

If you were thinking this was the ultimate, then you just haven’t got yourself into an Emirates state of mind. No, if you want the most ridiculous, most outrageous, utterly unsustainable car on the planet, you’d have to go to the Shelby Supercars booth and pony up about three-quarters of a million bucks for an Ultimate Aero. Obviously not satisfied with its previous model’s rather anemic 1,183 hp, the latest rendition of the beast now wrings out 1,287 hp from its 6.3L, twin-turbo V8. Yes, you are reading those numbers right and, no, I’m not talking about the Boeing 777 I flew in on. One assumes that the Aero’s already record-breaking speed of 412.28 kilome tres an hour will be elevated to something just short of the U.S. space shuttle’s re-entry speed. The distributor claims to have already sold four in the Middle East.

The outrageousness doesn’t stop there. Brabus sold every single one of the massaged Mercedes cars displayed in its booth on press day, before the show even opened. And then there was the Mantide — essentially a rebodied Corvette ZR1 costing about two million smackeroos. Only five will be built, though they might be a tough sell because they go only 347 km/h.

But my favourite display of the show was a little bit of Canadian-built insanity. Called a T-ATV (as in tracked all-terrain vehicle), the Sand-X is essentially a Bombardier snowmobile with its skis amputated in favour of a pair of sand tires. According to former Postie Neil Vorano, who has tested the crazed beast, the 158-hp, two-stroke twin accelerates to 100 km/h in less than three seconds. On sand!

Importer Urs Eiselin says hundreds of the Sand-Xs are already ripping through the desert, no doubt conserving fuel and sustaining the environment in some way I’m not yet quite understanding.